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I Wuv What I Do
In the splendid “Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination“, Hugh MacLeod asks us to “unify work and love“. His reasoning is sound:
“After family and friends, what else is there?” – Hugh MacLeod
Because I’m lucky to love what I do, I feel like I’ve been blessed. How about you?
Are you feelin’ lucky today, punk? – Dirty Harry
Make Meaning
Can you make meaning out of this freakin’ sketch? I can’t. As I drew it, I struggled to come up with some profound (lol!) words to express my thoughts on the thick and impenetrable “personal filter” (a.k.a UCB) that prevents us from experiencing what’s truly real – which is nothing, er, “no thing“?
Most Days, Some Days
On most days, the daily view statistics box for this blog looks something like this:
On some days, it looks like this:
It’s the trend in stats snapshots like this latter one that thrills me – not the total number of views. When I see one and two hits on a bunch of posts, as opposed to a bunch of hits on one or two posts, it indicates that I may have actually connected with someone on some level. What it doesn’t indicate, is whether it was a positive or negative connection.
How about you and your blog? What, you don’t write down and share at least some of your experiences, thoughts, ideas, and/or opinions? Why not?
Do one thing everyday that scares you. – Baz Luhrmann
Out Of Body, Head, And Mind
I’ve heard and read about people who’ve supposedly undergone “out of body” experiences. Hell, I haven’t even had an “out of head” experience, let alone a body-vacating one. Now, “out of mind” experiences are a different story. Those are where you remain in your head (so you’re still in your body) but not in your mind. In your body, in your head, out of your mind. Yepp, I’ve experienced several of those. As a matter of fact, I think I’ve been out of my mind ever since I started writing this stupid blog. Agree?
How about you? Which “out of” experiences have you had?
Follow Me!
The Amazon Kindle has a kool “share” feature. You can highlight a passage in the book you’re reading, write an introductory note for it, and then e-send the note-link pair to twitter. Here’s what one of these shared note-link pairs looks like in a Twitter timeline:
The link displayed in the tweet points to an online stored version of the highlighted text that is visible to the public. Here’s an example book snippet that I recently tweeted:
Sometimes, after sharing a passage from a spiritual book, I get one or two new Twitter followers the next day. Of course, they sign up to follow me cuz I’m wise and insightful, not because they have something they want to sell to me. Someday, I’ll move into the upper echelon of the spirituo-sphere with the big boys and girls:
Temporary Reprieve
Since I‘m an egomaniac and I often feel guilty about being one, I bash the “I, ME, MY” thought source all the time. However, since eliminating absolute black and white binary thinking is a major blow to my ego, I feel compelled to give credit where credit is due.
Being too lazy to concoct my own tribute to the ego’s sunny side, I’ll steal and regurgitate Steve Taylor‘s eloquent words to pay homage to “me“:
So there. Now that I‘ve said nice things about the “enemy“, the temporary reprieve is over and it’s time to get back to ego bashing. Stay tuned for more hipocritical ego bashing in the future.
Don’t Stop There
Buddha said that “life is suffering“. Many people, especially those stuck inside their head like me, stop there and say “no shit sherlock“. However, what if one continues on with “and if, by an act of grace, you come to realize this profound truth in your bones, your suffering will start to fade“?.
For the legions of skeptics out there, I do have a rigorous and irrefutable mathematical proof of this truth, but my sale price hasn’t been met yet.
Ripple Effect
During a peek-a-boo visit many years ago, it was revealed to me that everything a person does has a ripple effect:
What type of encoded signals modulate your ripples?
Eclipsed!
Steve Taylor‘s “The Fall” is an epic work. It’s both an academic and spiritual tour de force that covers the birth and subsequent explosion of the human ego throughout history. Using documented evidence from a wide range of archaeologists and anthropologists, he presents (what I opine is) an overwhelming argument that there is no innate “selfish gene“. You know, the one that everyone seemingly takes for granted and conveniently blames for man’s inhumanity to man.
In a nutshell, Mr. Taylor asserts that before 8000 BCE (yes, he goes all the way back to the dawn of man and painstakingly traces the life of the ego right up to us) all the available historical evidence points to the non-existence of war, oppression, patriarchy, and human exploitation of others. Please bookmark this page, read the book for the juicy details, and report your personal conclusions back here. Regardless of whether your UCB has been altered, I’d love to hear your before-and-after thoughts on the subject.
Simply Notice…
I’ve been following Leo Babauta, the creator of ZenHabits.net, for several years. Check out his inspirational story of personal transformation here: “About Leo“. In a recent Zen Habits newsletter, guest poster Gail Brenner suggested the following minimalist guide to inner peace:
This list recently came to mind while I was reading some complicated and messy library code in order to understand how to incorporate its functionality into my own code mess. Surprise! The source code was too dense and it required a deeper mental stack than the shallow one in my head, so I did what I usually do in those situations – I started getting pissed off. D’oh! Then, out of nowhere, step #2 in Gail’s list came to mind. I won’t answer the questions posed in the step, but you can imagine that they weren’t positive.
So, what did I do next? I briefly looked at step 3 and then I careened off course. I went out to stalk the library code author with the intent of ripping him/her a new one. Hah, just joking! What I really did was this. I stepped back from the hundreds of lines of source code and I reverse engineered a simpler, abstracted class diagram of the mess. By distancing myself from the code and using the more abstract class diagram to understand the code, I came to the same conclusion – it was a freakin’ mess. D’oh!
Are you wondering what my next step was? I ain’t tellin’.
Why am I here?
WTF?
Meh!
D'oh!
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